What will we call it?

Remember when there were nine planets, not eight? In 2006, Pluto got downgraded to the status of “dwarf planet,” meaning the solar system lost its coldest, farthest celestial body. Well, that’s might be about to change. No, Pluto is not getting its “planet” status back — instead, a new planet may be joining the family, the first to be discovered since Neptune in 1846. According to the Associated Press, astronomers Mike Brown and Kostantin Batygin at the California Institute of Technology have found “good evidence” on Wednesday for Planet 9 – a gas giant 10 times bigger than Earth that’s thought to take 10,000 to 20,000 years to revolve around the sun. The team, which recently started FindPlanetNine.com saw that six objects in the Kuiper belt — the galactic region that is home to Pluto — seemed to be influenced by a gravitational pull that could only be explained by the presence of a planet.

"What we have found is a gravitational signature of Planet 9 lurking in the outskirts of the solar system,” Batygin told the AP.

Mike Brown is the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg professor of planetary astronomy at Caltech, the author of How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming and owns the Twitter handle @plutokiller. As you may have guessed, he was crucial in the downgrading of Pluto back in 2006, so maybe this discovery is his way of making up for the lost planet. He told AP, "We have felt a great disturbance in the force." (Yes, a Caltech professor has just admitted the Force is real.) Even though Planet 9 hasn’t made an appearance yet via telescope, the team is confident that its first sighting could be within the next five years.

However, other astrophysicists are not as quick to rule the mathematical evidence grounds for a discovery. "This kind of thing comes around every few years. To date, none of those predicts have been borne out by discoveries," Alan Stern, the principal scientist for NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, said in an email to AP. "I'd be very happy if the Brown-Batygin were the exception to the rule, but we'll have to wait and see. Prediction is not discovery."

That may be, but as Brown told Mother Jones Planet 9 is “the most planet-y of the planets in the whole solar system." May the Force be with you, Planet 9.